LR-GCN: Latent Relation-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition

As an intersection of artificial intelligence and human communication analysis, Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has attracted much research attention in recent years. Existing studies, however, are limited in adequately exploiting latent relations among the constituent utterances. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel approach named Latent Relation-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (LR-GCN), where both speaker dependency of the interlocutors is leveraged and latent correlations among the utterances are captured for ERC. Specifically, we first establish a graph model to incorporate the context information and speaker dependency of the conversation. Afterward, the multi-head attention mechanism is introduced to explore the latent correlations among the utterances and generate a set of all-linked graphs. Here, aiming to simultaneously exploit the original modeled speaker dependency and the explored correlation information, we introduce a dense connection layer to capture more structural information of the generated graphs. Through a multi-branch graph network, we achieve a unified representation of each utterance for final prediction. Detailed evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate LR-GCN outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.